The Nifty Gaming Blog

The Nifty Gaming Blog is mostly about Dungeons & Dragons, plus general high fantasy and RPG nonsense. It is the half-baked brainchild of Patrick McCarty, who also does serious, grown-up writing over at Cracked.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

The new edition of D&D, which they’re just going to call
“Dungeons & Dragons” (apparently), will be released in July, starting with
a Starter Set and followed by a staggered release of the three core rulebooks,
plus a cool-looking couple of adventures. You probably already know that,
whoever you are.

I realize I picked a sort of odd time to start this blog. At
one point, hot off my rejection from Dragon
and Dungeon magazines, I planned on writing up the articles I had pitched,
maybe slapping together a PDF with free fonts and public domain art and
releasing it under the GSL, to try and get some modicum of practice writing for
D&D before the next submission window rolled around and would be allowed to
take another crack at the official magazines.

And then 4th Edition more-or-less died, and I
found out that last round of submissions was in fact to be the last round of submissions for Dragon and Dungeon in
their 4E incarnations, so that was that.

I suppose I could
have talked more about the previews of the upcoming edition, but I also hang
out on the Wizards forums and GiantITP, so I was mostly talked out on Next.
Which means I haven’t posted here in…awhile.

Also, turns out the big kick-off event for the new D&D
is Tyranny of Dragons, which makes my
piddly Empire of Dragons…thing seem even more redundant and derivative than it
was before. Although, not to toot my own horn, I like some of what I did with
the mythology. I might revisit some of that later on, but I think for now it’s
safe to say that I’m shelving that. It’s time, I think, to work on a new setting,
maybe something that hasn’t been done a thousand times. Once I get my hands on
the new edition I plan on writing stuff for it, depending on what the licensing
situation is for the new edition. (Quickly, for the uninitiated: Third Edition
had a very permissive license allowing third parties tons of room to publish
material for D&D without having to ask; 4E’s license was more restrictive in
some ways but still very generous, and there has been no word yet on what the
situation is with the new edition.) At any rate, watch this space, there’s more
to come…

Friday, September 20, 2013

So I meant to link this when it came out but forgot--if you don't already know about this, you should check out 4E Forever, a promising new fanzine for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. I'm a huge 4E fan, and once I started playing it I felt like it was the D&D game I had always wanted. I like Next too and I'm excited for what's to come, but it's nice to see that people still care about 4E.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

A quick post, because I
realize there’s something I’ve been doing with The Empire of Dragons that I’m
not sure I’ve ever explained. See, there’s dragons, and then there’s Dragons.

In the Empire, the word
for “Dragon” is the same as the word for “citizen” and “person.” With very few
exceptions, if you’re a dragon then you’re a citizen of the Empire and
considered a full person in the eyes of its laws and society. You’re a
capital-D Dragon.

However, you don’t have to be a dragon to be a Dragon.
Originally, this was because of dragons’ well-documented propensity to mate
with humanoids. There were people who didn’t at all look like dragons claiming direct descent from an actual Dragon—so where
do you draw the line? Dragons often wanted their children—even ones they had
with humanoids—to be citizens. But what about their children? And their children
(and so on)? Quickly, the rule was established: whether or not you were a
dragon, you were a Dragon if any Dragon said you were.

On the other hand,
certain crimes can get you stripped of your citizenship, and while it’s
forbidden to kill a Dragon, killing a non-Dragon is okay, even if they’re a dragon. Lowercase-d dragons, who lost their
citizenship for whatever reason, generally go into exile and live solitary existences
with their meager hoards, thus giving player characters plenty of classic
boss-monster dragons they can slay with impunity if that’s the sort of campaign
you want.

Incidentally, this
practice is the more likely explanation for the origin of the name of the
Mountains of Exile—disgraced former Dragons risked death by staying in the
Empire, so they braved long flight over the mountains to the north to find a
secluded cave in the more peaceful Orclands beyond.

For now, the Empire of Dragons setting
focuses on the titular empire—but what else shares its world? What powers can
possibly compete with the might of the Dragons?

The Dwarves

Many a Dragon makes
their home in the cavernous ruins of the old dwarven kingdoms. Within the
Empire’s borders, the dwarves have long since been chased out of their former
homes underground. Now, the few dwarves that live in the Empire dwell on the
surface alongside the more abundant humanoids. There are rumors of
long-forgotten dwarf kingdoms, deep beneath
the Empire, waiting for the right moment to return and reclaim their
ancestral halls, but most consider this to be nothing more than legend.

The last great kingdom
of mountain dwarves lies in the rugged mountains north of the Empire. In
Draconic they are called the Mountains of Exile. The dwarves who live there
call them the King’s Halls. The dwarves here are reclusive, jealously guarding
the treasure of the mountains. They have almost no contact with the Empire of
Dragons, and little more with the other powers in the world.

Occasionally, a Dragon
will try to carve out a little fiefdom for themselves on the southern slopes of
the Mountains of Exile. They tend to
disappear, and whatever followers they had managed to gather up in their
ill-fated endeavor quickly abandon the mountains after that.

No one is sure how the
dwarves protect their homeland. Some claim they are merely servants of the
mountains themselves, while others say they survive by making bargains with
strange, terrible creatures that live far beneath the earth. Other legends say
that the god of the dwarves, called the All-Father (perhaps an aspect or a
creation of Tiamat the Artificer) was imprisoned by Io deep beneath the
Mountains of Exile, giving them their name. There is power in the All-Father
yet, but only within those mountains. The dwarves have worked tirelessly for
generations, digging their tunnels ever deeper in order to free him and take
revenge on the Dragon God.

The Orcs

To the north of the
Mountains of Exile is a vast territory consisting mostly of temperate forest
and grassland. Stretching all the way to the frozen tundra of the north, the
Dragons call this country Orcland. In truth, much of this land is also claimed
by the dwarves, whose tunnels run far north of their mountain home. But the
orcs do not mine for the treasures of the earth, and so they are considered
welcome guests, free to hunt and farm on the surface of the dwarven land.

Mostly, the orcs are
peaceful, living in small agrarian villages or subsisting as nomadic
hunter-gatherers. They have a few cities, mostly on the coasts or near the
entrances to the dwarven kingdom, where they sell food and textiles in exchange
for baubles from the dwarves’ mines. They mingle freely with the humans and
elves in their land.

The Orcland is home to
the Orc King, a warrior so powerful he was blessed with immortality and
sovereignty over his people (or so it is said). He claims to rule over all
orcs, even those outside their ancestral homeland, and nearly all orcs—even those
living within the Empire—pledge loyalty to the Orc King.

It is generally
believed that, were the Mountains of Exile not in the way, the Orclands could
be easily conquered by the Empire of Dragons—however, even within the Empire,
the Orc King is spoken of with respect. He remains hidden away in his fortress
in the far north, ruling only through his viziers. Legends tell of him felling
an entire army singlehandedly, or calling on legions of ancestor-spirits to
fight at his side. And even if the orcs could be conquered, there is little
that would be gained from taking their land, since the dwarves lay claim to the
valuable resources beneath it.

The Elves

The elves are a
scattered, seafaring people, living in a loose alliance of islands, protected
by powerful magic. The Empire covets these islands, as they hold untold magical
secrets in libraries older than the Empire. The few remaining doorways to
Faerie are also hidden in the elvish islands.

Barring the few
ill-fated attempts on the dwarven homeland, the past few centuries’ worth of
military history in the Empire of Dragons has consisted of slowly conquering
these scattered islands. The conquered elves usually assimilate into the Empire
fairly easily. A Dragon is appointed to rule over their island, but life goes
on as normal provided the elves allow the Dragons free access to their magical
libraries.

It is a source of
constant frustration to the Empire that not all of the elves’ secrets are
contained in their libraries. Many of the islands rely on the magic of the land
itself, and when the land’s protection fails and the Dragons conquer it, the
island dies. Try as they might, the Dragons have been unable to access the
elves’ nature magic.

The Goblins

There is another
continent, across the ocean. Called the Western Land by the Dragons, it is home
to the Goblin Empire. The Goblins and the Dragons have thus far avoided total
war, and for most of their history have been content with a long and uneasy
peace. The Goblins are masters of arcane magic, which they use in the service
of their rigidly hierarchical, militaristic society. Reports from their clashes
with the Dragons tell of huge airships that blast magical energy at their foes,
and foot soldiers clad in indestructible armor that is lighter than silk. The
Goblins’ army is said to have terrible monsters in its ranks, created by transforming
prisoners into unthinking, unstoppable killing machines.

Like the Dragons, the
Goblin Empire craves the magical knowledge that the elves hide. When the two
great empires battle, it is usually over these islands. When the Goblins
conquer an elvish island, however, they raid them for anything usable and then
demolish everything that is left. The inhabitants are shipped to secret bases
on the mainland. Those with magical knowledge are put to work developing new
superweapons for the war effort. Everyone else is “processed”—transformed into
monstrous soldiers for use in their next campaign.

Many of its subjects
despise the brutality of the Goblin Empire, and they often flee to the shores
of the elvish isles, the Orclands, and the Empire of Dragons. They find welcome
enough in the Orclands—though few manage to reach those far northern shores.
Most goblin refugees eke out a meager existence in elf and Dragon territory,
where they come under immediate suspicion of being spies. A goblin can bargain
for their freedom in exchange for secrets from their homeland, although even
then they are rarely trusted, and must eke out a meager existence as servants
and laborers.

From these refugees,
the Dragon Empire knows that the Goblins have been gearing up for an all-out
attack on the Dragons for generations. Conquest unites the goblins, and as long
as they have a common enemy, their empire will remain intact.

Others

There are secondhand
reports from the mountain dwarves that the long-forgotten drow are returning to
the world, from doorways to Faerie hidden deep underground. Some say they
are coming at the behest of their brethren,
the elves who, trapped between two unstoppable empires, must turn to their old
enemies for aid.

There are those who say
that the other doorways to Faerie, the ones hidden throughout the world, never
really disappeared as most believe they did. It is whispered that the elves
await the opening of these gateways, when their fey allies will swarm into the
mortal world and destroy the two empires that have plagued them for years.

Some speak of other
foes, strange alien creatures that hide in the depths of the earth and long to
conquer it. They are hideous beings wrought of pure madness, and though they
are few in number and hidden far from the surface, they are infinitely patient.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

There’s a new Wandering
Monsters today from James Wyatt, about origin stories for D&D monsters.
It’s quite good, and worth a read even if you don’t care about D&D Next, if
only because you might find something in there worth plundering for your own
campaign. There’s a lot in there to talk about, but what I’m going to focus on
is pretty much irrelevant to the actual topic of the article.

I’m going to start with some
short, disjointed quotes from the second story, which Wyatt credits to Matt
Sernet. They’re not supposed to make sense, I’m doing this to point something
out:

“This one tells of a young man
whose beloved, a sailor, was lost at sea…the young man went to the shore and
called upon the gods of the sea and all other powers to return his beloved to
him. In answer, or so it seemed, a withered crone emerged from the water…she
spoke to him, offering to return his beloved if he agreed to perform a task for
her…

The young man demanded the return
of his beloved first, and the hag agreed…

The young man ran to the boat to
greet his beloved, and a pair of rotting arms rose up to embrace him. His
beloved was dead, drowned and nibbled by the fishes, risen by the sea hag’s
magic into a horrible zombie. The young man fled.

…

But the young man’s mind was all
but gone. His memories of his life before this hideous transformation were
vague at best, and he had no memory whatsoever of the beloved who had driven
him to his fateful bargain.”

Quick, what is the gender of the
ill-fated young man’s beloved? How do you know? Read the whole article if you
think I’ve pulled some trickery with the ellipses—the story goes out of its way
to avoid giving the beloved a gender.

I assumed the character was male.
Partly because the story conspicuously avoids a gender, partly because that’s
what I immediately thought when the
story referred to a sailor. Which is evidence of bias on my part, obviously—although
in my defense, D&D’s “default” is a sort of medieval-Renaissance high
fantasy pastiche, and in the real
middle ages a sailor was probably going to be a man. But this isn’t the real
middle ages, and it’s a generally accepted convention that the D&D world
has at least something approaching gender equality. If nothing else, DMs don’t
give female PCs a tough time for being female, although in-universe you could
say that NPCs are as sexist as anyone in the middle ages, but not in front of an obviously-powerful female
wizard/cleric/rogue/fighter/etc.

But in the egalitarian world of
D&D, a female sailor wouldn’t be remarkable. There wouldn’t be any controversy—certainly
not for the story’s real-world audience—if the story definitively identified
the sailor as a woman.

So I still read the sailor as a
man, which makes me wonder if this is as close as we’ll see to representation
of gender and sexual minorities in official D&D content. And while I
applaud James Wyatt, Matt Sernett, and Wizards for being inclusive at all, I’m
disappointed that they feel like gay characters are only possible if they sneak
them in by way of gender ambiguous zombie sailors. Still, baby steps I guess.

I did a little looking around online after I read the article. I’m
not really hip to the D&D tie-in fiction world and I’ve only seen a small
fraction of the published adventures out there, so there’s a ton of official
content that I’m not aware of. From what I found, though, it doesn’t look like
there are many gay characters, even implied gay characters like our friend the
ambiguous sailor.

But, it turns out Pathfinder is
ahead of the game in this regard. I ran across this forum
post from James Jacobs: “GLBT characters exist in Golarion, so make sure
they're included.

As long as Paizo continues to
have GLBT employees, we'll continue to put GLBT characters into our products.
In fact, even if the employee thing changes, we'll still put GLBT characters into
our products. As long as I have anything to say about it at least. There's a
gay couple in the next adventure, in fact, so the inclusiveness isn't stopping
with Anevia and Irabeth in this AP.

Furthermore, I'm gonna keep doing
this in our APs until it's no longer an issue and folks just talk about the
adventure without really pausing to discuss whether any one NPC is a sorcerer
or wizard. And at that point I'll keep doing it.”

I don’t play Pathfinder. LGBT
inclusiveness isn’t enough to get me to pick up a game system I don’t like. But
I applaud Jacobs’ sentiment, and I wish Wizards would follow Paizo’s lead on
this.

I wish I could see people like me
in official D&D content. I wish I didn’t have to make a big deal out of a
gender-ambiguous sailor in an article about monsters, because I wish that wasn’t the best representation gay
people could hope to get in an official D&D product.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

I've always struggled naming places in campaign worlds. This sometimes happens when I'm a player - I've had DMs have us make up locations for our character backgrounds, which they then incorporate into the geography of their campaign world (or they ignore them and we assume that they're off the map/too obscure to warrant inclusion, and that's fine too). I can rattle off a serviceable backstory easily enough, especially since background has never been all that important in our games. What matters is what happens at the table, after all. But coming up with a place for my character to be from can leave me paralyzed for minutes on end.

But however bad that can be, it's way worse when I'm DMing and I try to create stuff out of whole cloth. I originally used the Nentir Vale map for 4E, keeping the locations but freely reinterpreting them for the purposes of my own campaign. But as time went on and the lore for the setting grew, I got more and more paranoid about contradicting something established.

But you can just ignore the established lore, say the straw-man voices in my head. Maybe you can, I reply. I can't. Not easily, and not without needless hand-wringing.
I don't have this problem with naming characters. Names can be recycled. I can name my evil wizard Arthur, it doesn't matter that, in another universe, there's a legendary king named Arthur, it's just a name.

But places have names that are supposed to be unique. Sure there's fifty Springfields, but I can't have my players climbing Mount-Everest-No-Not-The-Real-One. But anytime I try to come up with a sufficiently "fantasy"-ish name I feel like I sound ridiculous. I can't send my players to the Lost Caverns of Mimsy-shriftenbibble. Other fantasy works can have nonsense-word names without issue, but I can't hack it.

The reason I bring this up now, incidentally, is because I was sitting on a train platform in New Jersey, thinking about how many place-names in the U.S. (particularly the east coast) are recycled. If they're not named after people, they just stuck "New" before some town from England for which they presumably felt homesick (or, possibly, wanted to thumb their nose at). I thought, it must have been nice to have a whole country's worth of place-names all ready to go when you discover a whole new continent steal someone else's land and put a country on it.

But then I remembered my summer in London, and how I will never stop thinking "Cockfosters" is effing hilarious. If I came up with that on my own for a D&D campaign I'd never hear the end of it, but it exists in real life and I guess everyone in London manages to keep a straight face about it.

Anyway, my solution for the place-name problem is usually to just use descriptive English words, possibly mashed together: "The Stone Hills." "The Grey Mountains." "Bluestone Hollow." "Greenbridge Village." But I worry that that's getting old--how many "[Color] Mountains" does your average fantasy world need anyway? So how do you handle place-names in your campaign? English words? String syllables together and hope for the best? Create entire fictitious languages?

Listen, hatchling, to another tale of the making of the
world. This one is whispered by the Not-Dragons, in their cities and around the
campfires. They hide it from us, from Dragonkind. That is why you must learn
it, because stories have power.

Long, long ago, Io made the world and made Dragons to rule
over it. You know this already, yes. What you do not know is that, in this
first age of the world, there were only the Dragons that Io made with Io’s own
breath. They did not die, and no new Dragons were born of them. Nor did they
fight, for all Dragons knew without question which portion of the world was
theirs, knew who was greater and lesser than them.

The world was beautiful, and Io loved it. But it was unchanging,
and Io grew dissatisfied. So Io created the animals, creatures of change. They
would create new animals and then grow old and die and their offspring would
grow and create and age and die in their turn. So change came into the world,
and Io saw the way the animals lived out their short lives, and the world was
beautiful, and Io loved it.

But Io wanted more. All Dragons, even Io, want more.
Remember that it is good to want more, but remember also that this can destroy
us.

So Io created new creatures. He made them small and weak,
and he gave them no names. We call them Not-Dragons. They made many names for
themselves later, but that is another story.

The Dragons said to Io (for in those days Io lived among us
undisguised), what is the purpose of
these creatures? They are too weak to serve us.

And Io said This is their Purpose. And
with those words Io breathed over the creatures, and gave them souls. They were
weaker than Dragons, yes, and duller, and their lives were short while ours are
endless. But the Not-Dragons had souls, and so they began to change themselves.
They created weapons and clothes, and stole magic from the air, the water, and
the land. And they became like Dragons themselves. The Dragons called out to
Io, demanded that Io set the world right and destroy these abominations. But Io
said nothing. He merely waited, and watched.

It came to be that the greatest of the humans, a mighty
emperor we now call the Artificer, believed he could challenge even great Io.
So the Artificer created a pair of wings, and stole the best magic from the
air, the water, and the land, and he flew up, up, up, beyond the moon and stars
into the endless darkness beyond, higher than anyone, Dragon or Not-Dragon, has
flown before or since. At last, he came to the crystal sphere that separates
this world from Io’s palace (for as you know, all worlds are but glittering
jewels in Io’s trove)—and he gathered his magic and broke through the wall.

Now, of course, this Not-Dragon was no match for Io. The god
devoured the Artificer whole. But remember that all you eat becomes part of
you. Remember, too, that all Dragons are part of Io. So when Io consumed the
Not-Dragon, Io changed, and all the Dragons changed.

This is why, they say, Dragons warred against each other,
why they mate and bear young, and why, now, they can die.

And this is why, they say, Io is now in two parts. The forms
and the names would come later, in another story. For now it is enough that Io
consumed the Artificer, and the Dragons were changed, and the god was divided.

This is why we do not eat the Not-Dragons. This is why,
sometimes, Not-Dragons can become Dragons—because of Io and the Artificer.

Is it true, you ask? But this does not matter. Look into the
eyes of a Not-Dragon. They have created names for themselves, they have made
weapons, they have stolen magic from the air, the water, the land. You can see
the story burning inside them like the white light of Io’s breath. That is the
power of this story, and that is why you must know it.

After that the Dragons were scattered and divided, and the
Not-Dragons ruled while the Dragons cowered and hid. We do not speak much of
the age of Not-Dragons. There are some still alive who remember that time. Find
one of them and ask nicely, hatchling, if you wish to know what happened next.
Or perhaps I will tell you that story. But not tonight.